Jeff Jacoby wrote a powerful column yesterday in the Boston Globe, demonstrating the media's refusal to acknowledge even the possibility of anti—Christian hate crimes existing, despite strong evidence. Of course, the fact that so many major media themselves heap scorn on Christians and Christianity might have a little to do with it. Here is Jacoby's lead:

SUPPOSE THAT in 2005 unknown hoodlums had firebombed 10 gay bookstores and bars in San Francisco, reducing several of them to smoking rubble. It takes no effort to imagine the alarm that would have spread through the Bay Area's gay community or the manhunt that would have been launched to find the attackers. The blasts would have been described everywhere as ''hate crimes," editorial pages would have thundered with condemnation, and public officials would have vowed to crack down on crimes against gays with unprecedented severity.

He then chronicles the wave of church burnings in Alabama:

Ten arson attacks against 10 churches —— all of them Baptist, all in small Alabama towns, all in the space of eight days: If anything is a hate crime, obviously this is.

The logic is pretty inescapable, and as we have also noted, authorities are doing their best to show that they are NOT hate crimes.

So where are the supposed anti—hate crime crusaders who have raised tens and tens of millions of dollars for their Alabama—based organization?

''I don't see any evidence that these fires are hate crimes," Mark Potok, a director of the left—wing Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Los Angeles Times. ''Anti—Christian crimes are exceedingly rare in the South."

But are anti—Christian crimes really that rare? Or are they simply less interesting to the left, which prefers to cast Christians as victimizers, not victims?

A search of the SPLC's website, for example, turns up no references to Jay Scott Ballinger, a self—described Satan worshiper deeply hostile to Christianity, who was sentenced to life in prison for burning 26 churches between 1994 and 1999. Yet if those weren't ''hate crimes," what were they?

The only conclusion one can come to is that a segment of American society has decreed that open season exists as long as the victims are Christians.

Hat tip: Ari Kauffman

Thomas Lifson   2 16 06